A Jew Who Loves Me

 

How do you know if someone loves you? Well, I will tell you how.

I was ill and could not come to morning prayers for several days. On the fourth day of my absence, I get a call.

“I know you are not feeling well, so please do not go outside today. It’s very cold.”

Somewhere up in his 80s, my friend has a mother’s love for me.

He is Hungarian. At the age of 11, he was taken to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Most of the kids sent there were later transported to Auschwitz. But he remained there, working in the kitchen and, through luck and miracles, somehow survived. In Israel, he worked as a driver for government ministers for many years and then as a manager of a public parking garage.

On Friday afternoons, he collects one of each of the many Shabbat weeklies that are dropped off in a bundle outside the synagogue, and puts them in a pile for me. He knows I like to read them and just does this because, I think, he loves me. And after prayers on Shabbat morning, before we go our separate ways, he looks at me with a smile and kisses my forehead.

I love him too, of course, and have listened to him tell me about his childhood for hours. He always has a complaint about something but follows each complaint with a smile and a chuckle.

When his wife died, he looked at me with a half smile of resignation and sighed.

He often visits a daughter and a son who live in Gedera, about an hour’s drive from Jerusalem. Each is married and each has three sons. Oh, how he loves those grandsons!

He has another daughter who lives with him. I have met her, a pure soul radiant with innocent astonishment at every little thing. The love of her life was killed in the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Since then, she has never entertained the thought of love or marriage with anyone else. But she takes care of her father with deep devotion and motherly love.

I think I know where she learned to love like that.

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  1. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    Thanks.  I too would kiss you on the forehead if I could.

    • #1
  2. Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu Inactive
    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu
    @YehoshuaBenEliyahu

    Flicker (View Comment):

    Thanks. I too would kiss you on the forehead if I could.

    Wow, how sweet of you to say that.  The feeling I can assure you is mutual.

    • #2
  3. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu (View Comment):

    Flicker (View Comment):

    Thanks. I too would kiss you on the forehead if I could.

    Wow, how sweet of you to say that. The feeling I can assure you is mutual.

    I know this is off topic, but, I once heard a well-known man (I’ll call him a religious leader, but he was more) who was asked if there was one thing — in one word — that would make the world a better place.  And he No, he didn’t think so.  Then some years later he readdressed the question and he said he thought that that one word was “respect”.  I’ve never forgotten that and I think lack of respect is a hallmark of what’s going wrong at least in the US politics and culture today.  Respect may be distinct or rightly viewed as a part of Love.

    Do you have any thoughts?

    • #3
  4. Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu Inactive
    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu
    @YehoshuaBenEliyahu

    Flicker (View Comment):
    Respect may be distinct or rightly viewed as a part of Love.

    Well, I think you can love — since it’s sometimes blind — without having respect.  But I think that love is a part of respect, to be sure.  The Talmud says that a respected person is one who respects others.  I think there is a lovable innocence about respected people.  They consistently do the right thing, including giving respect to those who may not appear to deserve it.

    • #4
  5. Flicker Coolidge
    Flicker
    @Flicker

    Thanks.  Just off the top of my musings.  I think you can respect the foulest person.  You can still say to a man who is about to executed for terrible things: May God have mercy on your soul.  That’s respect.  And you still shouldn’t lie to him, or steal from his pockets, out of basic respect for the man created in the image of God, even if that creation has gone horribly wrong.

    Maybe respect is the most basic form of human love.  Just thinking.

    • #5
  6. Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu Inactive
    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu
    @YehoshuaBenEliyahu

    Flicker (View Comment):

    Thanks. Just off the top of my musings. I think you can respect the foulest person. You can still say to a man who is about to executed for terrible things: May God have mercy on your soul. That’s respect. And you still shouldn’t lie to him, or steal from his pockets, out of basic respect for the man created in the image of God, even if that creation has gone horribly wrong.

    Maybe respect is the most basic form of human love. Just thinking.

    Very nicely put.  Yes, everyone is created in G-d’s image.  That’s why, according to Torah, if someone is hung for a crime, the body must be removed and buried before nightfall because the person hanging there was still created in G-d’s image and thus is deserving of respect (and not neglect).

    • #6
  7. Susan Quinn Contributor
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Thank you for sharing your friend with us, Yehoshua. Doing the simple things for each other are some of the most loving  things we can do.

    • #7
  8. Spin Inactive
    Spin
    @Spin

    Love is:

    Patient

    Kind

    It does not dishonor others.

    It is not self-seeking.

    Is it not easily angered.

    It keeps no record of wrongs.

    It does not in delight in evil.

    It rejoices in truth

    It protects

    It trusts

    It always hopes…

    …always perseveres.

    Where there are prophecies, they will cease

    Where there are tongues, they will be stilled

    Where there is knowledge, it will pass away…

    …but love never fails.

     

    • #8
  9. Caryn Thatcher
    Caryn
    @Caryn

    Refuah shelaymah.  I hope your illness has passed.  Your story is lovely and completely unsurprising.  The entire country is family.

    • #9
  10. Nanda Panjandrum Member
    Nanda Panjandrum
    @

    YB-E, first: Hoping that you’re feeling better! Next, what a joy to have a friendship like that! Third, thank you for sharing it with us, in this affirming and lovely post! Shalom, if I may…?

    • #10
  11. KentForrester Coolidge
    KentForrester
    @KentForrester

    Yehoshua, what a wonderful story.  I particularly like your use of the word “love” to describe the motive behind acts of kindness.  

    • #11
  12. Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu Inactive
    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu
    @YehoshuaBenEliyahu

    KentForrester (View Comment):
    I particularly like your use of the word “love” to describe the motive behind acts of kindness.

    In Hebrew, there is no word for like as in “I like you” or “I like pizza” so that the word “love” is probably used more often than in English.  I also think that in Israel people are not shy about revealing their feelings and that open expressions of love are acceptable.  Then again, I really do love just about everyone I meet — each is part of my extended family, after all — in this amazing country.

    Here’s the type of thing that happens here, not unusual at all.  I have a friend in my apartment building who enjoys fine spirits, although he only sips them on Shabbat and holidays.  We had a neighborhood Hannukah party the other night and, just as the party was getting under way, he knocked on my door with a bottle of single malt whiskey and two little glasses.  So we sat there for a while, said a la’haim and had a drink.

    We start talking and he tells me about his work as a technical writer.  He is originally from Russia and knows several languages.  Some of his work is classified, writing instruction manuals for defense industry products that are sold to other countries.  But he also does unclassified manuals for medical inventions that are exported.  He writes these in English so I offer my assistance should he ever need it.  There is a tight social network here, you know everything about your neighbors and their families, interdependence and mutual assistance are ingrained.

    I mention to him that two young women recently moved into the apartment across from mine and I ask him if he met them yet.  He says he saw them but did not say hello.  Why not?  He says he does not want them to get the slightest impression that he might have romantic interest in them.  (He is married with four children.)  This strikes me as out of character since he is not religiously observant but, then again, his ignoring these young women is not really surprising to me either.

    I see three Israeli character traits in my friend’s attitude.  The first is efficiency, the ability to focus, laser like, on whatever you are doing at the moment.  Whatever he is doing, wherever he is going, whatever he is thinking, would be interrupted by a conversation with women with whom no relationship will ever develop.  The second is honesty, why give them the slightest reason to imagine something about him that is not true.  The third is decency, it’s just not appropriate to make small talk with single women when you are a married man.

    • #12
  13. Podkayne of Israel Inactive
    Podkayne of Israel
    @PodkayneofIsrael

    הרודף אחרי הכבוד, הכבוד בורח ממנו.

    • #13
  14. Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu Inactive
    Yehoshua Ben-Eliyahu
    @YehoshuaBenEliyahu

    Podkayne of Israel (View Comment):

    הרודף אחרי הכבוד, הכבוד בורח ממנו.

    .מי זה מכובד?  המכבד את הבריות

    • #14
  15. Podkayne of Israel Inactive
    Podkayne of Israel
    @PodkayneofIsrael

    We were just talking about this in my Torah class this week.

    • #15
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